(; ; THE CR.ITIC5 I I , I · I . I I · I. I I "- " -;1 I I I. I I I 11 1 I I ,I 1. 11 . .111' ... I . . . ----- - \ , '< \ ... .. , .. .. , , ..... - / _. -- THE CURRENT CINEMA WOMAN ON TOP BY TERRENCE RAFFERTY I N "Disclosure," Barry Levinson's movie version of Michael Crichton's recent best-seller, Michael Douglas plays Tom Sanders, a computer-industry executive whose comfortable livelihood is threatened by his sexually predatory new boss, Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore). Douglas has made a career of being pur- sued and ravished by beautiful, dangerous women-Glenn Close in "Fatal Attrac- tion," Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct"- and his presence in "Disclosure" turns this sexual-harassment thriller into instant camp. Once again, he's the beleaguered object of desire-the poster boy for male fear of aggressive female sexuality. As you watch Demi Moore throwing herself at him, you realize that his status as the Clarissa Harlowe of male-backlash cin- ema is based not on his looks or his cha- risma but on his unsurpassed ability to appear pained and miserable during sex. His veins bulge, his mouth contorts into a rictus of agony, and his neck stretches alarmingly; he looks like one of the war victims in "Guernica." This quality is, of course, entirelyap- propriate to Michael Crichton's vision of gender warfare in the workplace. Mere- dith Johnson is a corporate shark with pearly teeth-some of which she keeps out of sight and bares only when she gets the urge to gobble up a male subordinate. On her first day as vice-president of DigiCom, the Seattle company where ::j Tom works, she invites him to her office Ll.J for a pnvate, after-hours meeting. She and Tom were lovers ten years ago, and al- B though he's now happily married, she ob- c:Q 2 viously feels that her new position as his supervisor should be more than enough to persuade him to resume their relationship. So she sends her secretary home and jumps his bones. In the ensuing tussle, the hero's conscience struggles mIghtily against all the forces pushing him toward the abyss that Meredith represents: the fear of financial calamity; his reluctant state of arousal; the angry impulse to turn the tables on his aggressor-to show her, with manly mastery, who's really the boss. After several min- utes of humid ambiva- lence, Tom stops, just short of taking the final plunge, and Meredith, howling with fÌ11stration, vows to destroy him. Crichton's crude role-reversal scenario requires an actor with special skills. If we're going to buy the male- . . ., VIctIm concept, It won t do to have the hero blush and stamp his foot and scream "How dare you?" like the be- sieged virgins of gothic fiction. And Douglas, in the course of his unique career, has de- veloped what amounts to the masculine equiv- alent of that maidenly modesty. His flushed face and strained sin- ews tell us that Tom is spurning Meredith not because he doesn't 107 want her but because he wants her so bad it hurts. He enjoys the thrill of moral victory only after suffering the agony of tumescence. The sex scene happens early; once it's over, and the hairy chest beneath the hero's ripped bodice has been revealed, the movie gets ordinary in a hurry. Meredith, preëmptively, accuses Tom of harassment, and the rest of the picture consists of charges, countercharges, cor- porate maneuverings, high-tech shop- talk, and resolutely unsuspenseful searches through computer files. The screenwriter, Paul Attanasio, has wisely pruned most of the novel's anti-feminist polemicizing, but without the lush foliation of Crichton's ideological rage the story seems pretty thin. Ultimately, the sexual-harassment theme, which is supposed to be the movie's selling point, recedes into the background. As the picture goes alông, it becomes just another thriller about a falsely accused man racing against the clock to clear his name and nail the villain. In narra- tive terms, the only significance of Meredith's claim is that it turns Tom into a pariah at DigiCom: for all practi- cal purposes, she might as well have accused him of poor personal hygiene. The sad fact is that- with the exception of its floridly silly centerpiece scene-the picture is tasteful, bland, and only mildly entertaining. Even the sleekinforma- tion-superhighwayam- bience doesn't perk up the dull story. People prowl through cyber- space instead of dusty filing cabinets; the sole difference is that the ominous shadows of darkened offices have been replaced by bright, cartoony computer graphics-it's the same old road, but with a worse view. Although "Disclosure" is bound to make a pile of money, it's hard to imagine any- one being terribly ex- cited by it. The pic- ture just doesn't have Demz Moore as the predatory enough power to break corporate shark in "Disclosure " down a viewer's resis- '- .